


An Ideal Husband

by fiendlikequeen



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Dirty Talk, Internalized Homophobia, Light Angst, Light Bondage, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Canon, Rimming, bottom!Francis, bruno mars's 'marry you' playing in the distance, top!James
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:02:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26113084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiendlikequeen/pseuds/fiendlikequeen
Summary: London, 1850: Francis finds himself the object of a proposal, as opposed to its subject. This outcome is rather better than in Francis's previous experience.My addition to the Terror_Exe Flash Fest!
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 45
Kudos: 120
Collections: @terror_exe Flash Fest





	An Ideal Husband

**Author's Note:**

> Title stolen from Oscar Wilde. Enjoy whatever this is! I had to REALLY dial back the angst on this one. This fic wanted to break my heart. I made it horny instead. I riffed off this tweet - how could I resist? YEET
>
>> Fitzjames' Story: The One With Proposing To A Bitch In It.
>> 
>> — Rorret Smh (@terror_exe) [August 16, 2020](https://twitter.com/terror_exe/status/1294788954256965632?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Francis ought to be nervous when James produces a length of velvet cord and makes a rather lewd suggestion for its use. Instead, he is all indulgence, out of adoration; with only minimal complaint, he allows himself to be led upstairs, stripped naked, and soundly kissed. More importantly, he surrenders himself to be tied to the bed, his arms bound above his head like a man about to be lashed.

Hopefully this isn’t what James has in mind. Still, it bears investigation.

“Why,” asks Francis, when he is trussed up like a Christmas goose, “do you want this?”

James is idly stroking Francis’s flank, regarding Francis with an open leer. “Do you not trust me?”

“Certainly not, when you are in such a mood. What _do_ you want with me?”

“What do I want?” asks James, as if he can hardly believe the question. He goes on caressing Francis, his fingers dipping lower and lower, until he brushes the root of Francis’s prick. “From you – everything.”

Francis can find no response to this save a livid blush that spreads from his crown to his navel.

James throws one leg over Francis and settles into his lap. “I am a covetous creature, you know. Have you not said so yourself? That I am vainglorious, and prideful? Sybaritic, even?”

Francis has, and he regrets it. “James-”

James does not allow this protestation. “Hush. You know it’s true. I am hardly alone in this matter. It is only natural for a man to have such yearnings. Such desires. It is _your_ disdain for them that is the aberration.”

Francis tries for a sharp rebuke to that, but can hardly offer any barb when James leans down to kiss him. He licks at Francis’s closed lips, sighs happily when Francis admits him; reaches forward to tangle his fingers in Francis’s hair, stroking him as one might caress fine fabric, or rich fur.

“Knowing this, my dear Francis,” purrs James, when he has released Francis’s mouth in favour of nibbling at Francis’s jaw, “why does it surprise you to know that I should like to _own_ you?”

“James,” says Francis, more than a little waspishly, and trying not to gasp as James shifts in his lap, brushing their pricks together, “you – Christ, haven’t I shown you that you already _do?”_

James sits back on his heels, regards Francis with a look that nearly suggests violence. “I want more than that.”

Of course he does. James _always_ wants more. Of everything that all of creation has to offer.

“I want to own you before the world,” he goes on. “Not only here, in our bed. I want you on my arm in Regent’s Park. To escort you to the opera or the theatre-”

“Of course you’d think of the bloody _theatre,_ ” Francis grumbles, but James goes on, undeterred.

“To share your bed, and not worry what the maids should think. To own you as proudly as Sir James owns Lady Ross-”

“I should think it’s the other way around,” interjects Francis.

“I want, more than anything,” James says, and he presses his palm to Francis’s heart. “People to look at you and think – ‘here, this - this is Fitzjames’s.’”

Francis can feel his own wild heartbeat hammering against James’s hand. He cannot meet James’s gaze. He stares, instead, at the beauty mark on the other man’s shoulder.

“It sounds,” he remarks, very quietly, “as though you are making the sort of…proposal I myself have made, in past.”

James’s nails bite into Francis’s flesh. “And if I am?” He takes Francis’s face in one hand, forces Francis to look at him. “What of it, Francis?”

“You cannot be serious,” he says. James releases him. Leans back, appraises Francis with a furrowed brow. Francis realizes, all at once, why James has him restrained. Were he free, he would surely attempt to knock the fool notion right out of James’s idiot head. “You want to – for God’s sake, James, to even imagine-”

“But I do,” James insists. “I do, Francis. Surely you of all people understand what it is to want this, even when you are denied it. Especially then.”

A memory - a bitter, near-forgotten pain like the ache of an old wound - twinges at Francis’s mind: _twice, as I heard it._

“So you’d make me Mrs. Fitzjames, would you?”

Francis means it to sting, means for it to be a mockery. It ought to sound ridiculous – it does. But James’s eyes blacken and he surges forward, seizing Francis’s jaw in one hand and forcing himself into Francis’s mouth in a kiss. The palm on his chest now gropes for Francis’s prick, pulls at it nearly painfully.

“Yes,” he says, when he has backed off long enough to let Francis draw a breath. His greedy mouth roves down Francis’s neck. He bites down at the soft flesh just below Francis’s ear, and the latter cannot contain a hiss. There will be a mark there, tomorrow, above Francis’s collar. James knows this, of course. “Yes, I would. I would marry you, and have you, for all the world to know you mine-”

“I think I’d make a rather ugly bride, don’t you?” Francis has no defense save his bitterness. He regrets the cruelty, but what other choice does he have? James’s desire is an impossible one. It is unkindness, surely, to let them both yearn for the unattainable.

“Do not mock me. I do not want you as a _bride,_ ” spits James. He has pulled back, but is still fucking Francis’s cock with a tight fist. “I want you as you _are._ I want you as a man. I want you as Francis Crozier. As Francis Rawdon Moira _Fitzjames_.”

The rebuke Francis is about to offer melts away on his tongue when, for a moment, he imagines it. Clinging to James’s arm at some insufferable dinner-party, introduced not as a dear friend – how insufficient that term is! – but as a _husband._

“Show me, then.”

“What?”

“How you would make me Mr. Fitzjames.”

“You mean-”

Francis should not want it. Neither should James. They do, all the same.

“I would accept you, if I could,” he says. A better answer than _you make me happy – but your station does not,_ though it is still a denial. “If you could – if we could-”

“Marry,” supplies James, when Francis struggles with the word.

“Aye. If we could…marry, how would you – how would you have me?”

James regards him evenly, but with an ardour from which Francis shrinks. His tongue darts out to wet his part lips, and his eyes burn. His hair is a mahogany halo and his chest heaves. He is magnificent.

“I would,” he begins. His voice has dropped in tone by a half-octave. It is a deep, predatory hum, like a wolf’s warning growl. “I would…take you.”

“You’d _fuck_ me,” corrects Francis. “And that is hardly different from the current state of affairs. How would my _husband_ do it differently?”

It feels ridiculous to say – Francis’s _husband_ – but the reaction it provokes in James is astonishing. He is not only frigging Francis now; he has himself in hand, tugging viciously at his own prick.

“The world would know of what I would do to you,” says James. His tone is low and rough – almost the desperate groans of a man in pain.

“They would?”

“Yes. There would be the sort of jokes all newlyweds hear. Titters, and the like, about your not being able to sit proper after our honeymoon.”

Francis’s cock twitches at that. At mincing along the street, only half-hiding the delicious tenderness gotten from James’s fine prick. “Yes.”

“And I would be congratulated, at my club. Clapped about the shoulders by other espoused men,” James goes on. “There would be meaningful looks and wagged eyebrows. Less polite gentlemen would ask me whether my beloved spouse was still pained by my attentions, or if he had come to enjoy them.”

Francis hisses as James passes a thumb over the head of his prick, working down the shaft the wetness that has collected at the tip. “And what,” he manages, “would you tell them?”

“I would smile, and plead my _husband’s_ modesty,” he returns. The particular relish with which he pronounces the word – _husband,_ again – twists and sticks in Francis’s belly. “And for his sake, say nothing.”

“Modesty? Or would you be ashamed of me?”

James’s grip tightens like a vise. Francis chokes out a ragged groan. “Never that. I would not need to feel shame, not ever again.”

There is more in that than James’s wild fantasy of matrimony. But now is hardly the time for it.

“And you – you would be asked by young ladies what it is like to have a husband. What things a man might do in a bedroom, and like done to him.”

“And would I whisper to them how it feels to have a man’s hard prick inside me? His hot mouth on my body?” returns Francis. James nods once, fiercely. His eyes are black, glittering in the low light like faceted onyx. “Yes. I would sigh and blush to reveal the countless pleasures of being taken by my husband, until they seethed with jealousy at my good fortune.”

“ _Christ,_ Francis.”

“Do it, then,” says Francis. He lifts his chin, dares James to deny him. “Take me as a husband would.”

James regards him for a moment, and then nods. He goes to untie Francis’s hands, but:

“No.”

“Francis?”

He cannot marry James, but will offer himself wholly nonetheless. “No. Like this, James.”

James bends forward to leave a kiss on Francis’s collarbone. “If you’re certain.”

Francis grunts his assent, a sound that thickens into a moan when James releases his prick, pats him on belly, and climbs off him. Francis knows he has only gone to retrieve the rapeseed grease from the top drawer of his dressing-table. He finds himself melancholy for James’s warmth all the same.

Grease in hand, James sits down by Francis’s knee. He makes a great show of pouring a generous helping into his palm, before oiling the first two fingers of his right hand.

Francis stifles a grunt of impatience when James’s hands apply themselves to him at last.

“I would want to have you like this on our wedding-night,” he says. He plucks idly at one Francis’s nipples, before leaving a slick trail down to his navel. “Would you like that?”

“James-”

“I would be very good to you, you know.”

Of this Francis has no doubt. “Then you had best get on with it. It won’t do to leave me wanting, hm?”

“No,” says James. He leans forward, nuzzles at the inside of one of Francis’s thighs. Gets his hands under Francis’s legs and bends his knees so that Francis is splayed open before him. “No, it won’t.”

James meets Francis’s eyes and noses at Francis’s bollocks, then softly, sweetly kisses the tender strip of flesh between them and his arsehole. The moment he licks Francis’s entrance in earnest, Francis’s bucks against his restraints and curses.

“After the wedding,” he says, leaving off Francis’s poor, twitching flesh for an agonizing moment. “I’d lead you upstairs. Lay you on our wedding-bed, and kiss every part of you, ‘till you’d plead with me to _get on with it._ ”

“Jesus God-” James has busied himself at Francis’s hole again, but not for long.

“I’d have you on your back, first. So I could look at your lovely face,” James goes on. Francis would usually take issue with that word – _lovely –_ but cannot find it in himself to protest. “And you’d cling to me, and kiss me when I entered you.”

Francis cries out as James dips his head back down to tongue at that entrance. James’s eyes flutter shut and Francis feels the man’s low rumble of delight at the same time he hears it. Some part of him unfurls at the sound – a petal, uncurling before the sun, or a cat stretching before the fire. Something soft revealed in warmth.

James’s hand comes up, splays itself across Francis’s hip. His other hand is working savagely between his legs. He casts his gaze upward, and Francis can only tolerate its raw ferocity a moment before he shuts his eyes and surrenders entirely to James’s mouth.

He kisses that intimate part of Francis the way he would kiss Francis’s lips. With closed lips first, before they part to reveal his clever tongue. Small, tantalizing flicks of that tongue until his prey is wet and open, and he can press himself inside.

Francis groans under the assault, twisting and gasping like a speared fish at the wet, indecent sounds produced when James points his tongue and enters him with the barest hint of its tip.

“Christ, James, that’s-”

“Yes,” murmurs James. He slips one finger inside, licks the stretched rim of Francis’s hole. “Yes, you’d cry out so loud the whole house would hear you, even some of our wedding-guests-”

“James-”

“They’d pour themselves the remainder of our champagne, and toast our happiness,” says James. Two fingers work their way in and out of Francis now with a maddening precision. James is exact – prissy, even – in all things, and this is no exception. “A toast for every delightful moan they heard.”

Francis allows himself such a moan.

“And later, we would take – well, not a _bridal_ tour, but still, we would go to the country, to attend upon all those that could not see us at the wedding,” says James. He has curled his first two fingers over a third, and is seeking out that spot inside Francis. When he finds it, he gets a yelp. “And I would have you in every bed lent to us for the night by beloved relatives. And when we breakfasted in the morning, note would be taken of your lovely pink cheeks, and there would be knowing looks about why you could not look at me without going as red as an apple-”

“Yes, James, _yes-”_

“Their servants would groan at having to attend to the sorry state of our bedlinens. There would be complaints of sheets stained beyond saving, and torn pillow-cases-”

Francis shudders, cries out. “James, for God’s sake,” he says. “Enough. I – Christ, I need you inside, now.”

The sound this provokes from James would best be termed a growl. His fingers are removed, roughly, and he clambers up between Francis’s legs to bruise a kiss to his mouth. He fumbles with the grease a moment before slicking up his lovely prick. Francis is almost sure that he will perish in the anticipation of having James inside him but then – oh, it is well worth the wait.

It is pure bliss.

James’s sets a pace that is almost hurried, hardly the leisurely rollicking of before. He thrusts hard, frigging Francis’s cock as he pleasures him deep and fast.

“Do you want it, too?” he asks, desperately. Hard to believe that this plaintive, thready plea is coming from the man currently buggering Francis to – hopefully - oblivion.

“Yes.”

James groans and shuts his eyes. Francis would reach for him, but strains against his bindings instead. “Tell me, Francis.”

Francis will tell James, and be damned for it. “Want to have you, alone,” he murmurs. Greedy thing he is, he would hoard James, body and soul, like a miser his coin. “Want your – oh, Christ, James – your prick and your mouth and your hands to myself, want every bright-eyed young lady or gallant gentleman to – oh!”

He breaks off, fighting a wave of pleasure that threatens him with shipwreck.

“To what, Francis?” pants James. He drops his head to Francis’s neck with a wretched groan. “Tell me, you _must_ tell me-”

Francis babbles as loosely as James now: “They would be green with envy, to know that of all creatures living, you have chosen _me_ -”

James’s thrusts are brutal, and his teeth graze Francis’s throat. Francis will feel his marks tomorrow morning, and would have nothing else.

“They’d all – oh, yes, yes – they’d all want you for their own,” says Francis. They already do. James seems to be unable to set foot outside their door but he is being chased by some person or another. “And they’d make themselves sick with jealousy when you so much as kissed my hand.”

“I couldn’t – I don’t care for them,” groans James, and Francis very nearly hisses with glee at it. “Not – I want _you-_ ”

“How they would all sigh and swoon to know how well I am treated-”

“Yes, yes, more-”

“And loathe me at the merest thought of the pleasures of our marital bed, knowing only I could ever have them-”

“Yes, you – there could be no one else because I – oh, Francis, because I _love you,_ damn you-”

That is enough to have Francis crying out his triumph, emptying in James’s hand and across his own belly. James is not far behind, and Francis kisses him, sucking on his tongue as he trembles and spurts inside Francis’s body.

James clings to him until his spent cock slips out of Francis. There is a deep sigh – whether it comes from Francis or from James, neither is sure.

Eventually, James stirs enough to works Francis’s bindings loose before flopping down heavily next to him. He slings a leg across Francis’s body, and draws Francis into an embrace. Francis, for his part, contents himself with playing with James’s hair. His spend is beginning to dry on his abdomen; James’s leaks from his body. He couldn’t care a whit for either thing.

“I mean it, you know,” says James, some time later, when Francis is near sleep. “I want marriage, above all things.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Drowsily, Francis kisses James’s forehead, and pronounces the following vow: “I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yo, I went nuts on this one. I saw an opportunity for crack and thought "how about some internalized homophobia instead?" Guess that's what happens when you live with only one foot out of the closet. RIP me.


End file.
